Customer Culture
Get Branded by Your Customers
Customer Culture
There is only one reason to transform your company into a brand but it’s a big one: you transfer sustainability of the company to your customers, who advertise and sell for it, and protect it if stumbles or gets attacked. Cause this strongest of customer loyalty and evangelism to happen on your watch and you not only resolve a lot of current issues, you fix the future of the company. Achieving brand status is the ultimate legacy impact for any management team.
But what is a brand? Let’s put advertising and design aside; both are important but they only serve the brand. A brand promise is a company saying, “You will know us by our intention.” Accepting that intention isn’t a matter of trust, it is a matter of achieving the highest level of trust possible from human beings. A brand is about faith – “I believe but I don’t know” – since there is no way to be certain of whether the company will deliver on its intention.
A culture exists to protect itself; it doesn’t even like to extent trust, fearing it could be vulnerable. To offer unfounded trust is the rarest gift a culture can give and getting it is the essence of being a brand. You have to get faith from both your employee culture, which has to represent the brand intention to others with its own good name, and from your customer culture, which has to ignore all other buying options, no matter how credible or seductive.
Being a brand is 20% about strategy, which has to be passion-driven and sophisticated. It is 80% about discipline, which has to be uncompromising and unending. SLAP will make your company brandable with a proprietary solution process that provides both the strategy and the ongoing discipline.
You Must Be Branded For How You Sell
Not Just WhatYou Sell
THE SOLUTION PROCESS
STRATEGY
We develop the strategic schematic that identifies what your company really needs most from its customer culture, which is not always what it appears to be. We complete a deep psychographic profile of your customer culture to reveal to you what it would buy from you if it could buy anything, which is not simply the product or service that you are selling. These two strategic decisions are combined to achieve a cycle of urgent interdependency, assuring you that your customers will provide what you really need most from them when you provide what they really need most from you. We then translate this to a number of activation guidelines that allow the business to make rapid decisions that are brand consistent.
We then confirm the deepest personal passions of your CEO and senior-most team and imbed this into the brand promise to ensure it is always prioritized and protected. We identify a foundational unchanging noble purpose to the brand so we give both your employee and customer cultures a sense of self to be gained by protecting and promoting the brand. Oh, and we imbed a competitive trip wire so that when this all works and your competitors react, their predictable counter to your success blows up on them.
EXPERIENCE
You have to be branded for something you can control and that’s not what you sell but how and why. We will develop a brandable customer (sales/support) experience for you: spectacular, signature, sustainable. We also develop a customized communications personality and style guide for your company so that when you talk, customers know its you and are prepared to listen, remember, trust and advocate.
PROTECTION
Brand strategies often fail because companies fail to look where customer and employee cultures look to decide whether to grant the leap of faith required to become a brand. Your cultures can’t be certain about the credibility of your brand intention so they’ll look for any gap anywhere between company promise and delivery and decide accordingly. Our proprietary Guard the Gaps diagnostic looks where these cultures will look and makes recommendations about how to close and prevent the gaps. It paves the road so your brand strategy can roll successfully.
DISCIPLINE
Our brand discipline process includes making both the business case and emotional case for brand adherence, transferring manageable brand discipline into every business unit throughout the company and providing a guide for CEO evangelism.
THE MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS: HEAVEN
You have to be branded for something you can control and that means not just for what you sell, but also for how you sell it. We define a brandable customer experience as
SPECTACULAR
Not just ordinary, friendly and reactive but blow your customers right out of their socks.
SIGNATURE
Featuring aspects of the experience a customer can only get from you. You pioneered them and if another company copies you your customer is going to know it.
SUSTAINABLE
No matter how spectacular and signature, the customer experience is manageable and affordable within the company so it can be consistently delivered outside.
HEAVEN SESSION AND POST-SESSION ANNOTATION
Conceiving of a brandable customer experience is tough for even the smartest of management teams. They’re painfully aware of financial and operational realities and mixed priorities and rarely approach the idea of creating the experience with the right attitude or proper creativity. The real triggers for maximizing reaction from a customer culture are shrouded in mystery and may not be consciously realized by customers themselves.
SLAP will fix this. It’s our job to show you how to generate the most innovative strategies and tactics possible and then show you how they can be made affordable and achievable. That’s why we’ll take your key people to Heaven, where anything and everything is possible and affordable.
Heaven is a 1.5 day session that generates restriction-free thinking based around our proprietary deconstruction of what makes a customer experience strong enough to be brandable. It’s a wild affair, even by our disturbingly high standards. The session isn’t all floating around on fluffy clouds munching freshly peeled grapes, though. It features a unique planning process (Heaven on Earth) that transforms the creative into the pragmatic. Your people will then run each idea through a series of filters, including the resources – time, talent and dollars – required to implement and which ideas will generate the fastest revenue response.
Over 60% of the hundreds — and sometimes thousands — of seemingly impossible ideas generated in a typical Heaven session can actually be implemented without the use of any additional company resources. Why do you think we call it Heaven?
Post-session, SLAP will then take the total Heaven output, analyze it, recommend ideas best implemented as first and second stage, annotate it with our own comments about how to make priority ideas even more impactful and organize all of the output into a database that can be used and added to for many years. We can also analyze your complete customer experience, provide our own original recommendations and merge these with your database to become immediately actionable.
THE KEYNOTE SPEECH: THE HUNGRY AND THE HUNTED
There is no greater way of growing and protecting a company than transforming it into a brand. That requires achieving maximum commitment from both your employee and customer cultures, which is what Stan Slap knows best. In this keynote speech he will explain what a brand is, how your company can become a brand – including what will work and what won’t. Because a brand is maintained by the relationship between a company and its customers he’ll explain why, if you’re sitting in the audience, the brand is in your hands. This is a presentation of special importance for a sales organization.
THE BOOK:
It’s coming soon. It’s the third book in Stan’s three-book series on maximizing cultural commitment in manager, employee and customer cultures.
Talk to Us
SLAP
450 Geary St.
Suite 100
San Francisco, CA 94102
(415) 362-1240
